since the president is taking his first foreign trip to the middle east, how do you see his policy and can he achieve something in his second term? >> i'm hoping to keep the focus on the big question before us, which is the lessons of a decade of war. general that the mentioned how war does not often turn out the way you want it to, as the air battle concept would be too much towards. how owards that direction, did that shift resources away from europe and asia in the 2000's? >> you said regarding one of the, with in history, 3 packets of a regime but they were doing this for 3 decades. it's only in the end that the u.s. learned of weapons. the regime was brutal all the time. >> we have the whole world on a table. onhow has our expenditures iraq affected our ability to operate elsewhere? the united states is the number one superpower. we have the largest economy. so we manage to remain engaged in other parts of the world. but that does not refer to the proposition that the war iraq was excessively expensive, not only morally but financially and physically. and it has not contributed to